Category: Charity and Mercy

Rescuing Refugees

Stratis is a fisherman in Greece, who has personally helped rescue thousands of refugees. He says it all comes down to one simple fact: we’re all human. pic.twitter.com/lmYqpWgWyI — AmnestyInternational (@amnesty) May 21, 2018

Supporting Civil Disobedience in Support of Dreamers

A hard condition of our communities is found among Dreamers vulnerable to unjust deportation; the hard work on their behalf is found among those who have actively protested in defense of those Dreamers. For the rest of us, Voces de la Frontera offers an opportunity to contribute to pay the fines of twenty-three who protested […]

Reading and Reviewing

There are two books I’m eager to review here at FW: Katherine Cramer’s Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016) and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story (4.18.17).  Like many others, I’ve been awaiting Goldstein’s book for some time, knowing that significant works take time. For both books, […]

More on the Right Social Conditions in a Small Town

I posted yesterday that Gentrification Requires the Right Social Conditions, contending in part that a small city like Whitewater remains divided (and by consequence limits its own attractiveness to newcomers) because it remains divided by town and gown (and divided within the town, itself, too). Whitewater’s problem is not that different factions do not have a […]

Gentrification Requires the Right Social Conditions

I’ve written that Whitewater faces a choice between decisive action now (to lessen government’s role) or years of stagnation and relative decline before eventual gentrification (at which point longtime residents will have almost no say in redevelopment). See, How Big Averts Bad. As I doubt Whitewater’s local political class has the will for near-term changes, the best […]

An Oasis Strategy

There’s a wide difference between believing that we’ve difficult national or local times ahead and losing confidence. I’m as confident today as ever that Whitewater has a bright long-term future. There’s simply hard work ahead between now and then, and more hard work now than we might have hoped (national trends being what they are). What to do? […]

The Whitewater Community Foundation’s First Annual Campaign

Please see a news release about charitable work in our small city — best wishes to all who are supporting the campaign – Whitewater Community Foundation is concluding its first ever Annual Campaign Thank you to everyone who donated! We reached our modest goal of $50,000, and the donations are still rolling in! Thank you to […]

About Standards

I’ve long argued that the application of continent-wide standards to local challenges offers better solutions for our small town than a hyper-localism that ignores best practices from across our country. See, What Standards for Whitewater? We will achieve little, and leave less for the next generation, if we do less – if we reach lower – […]

Sunday Animation: We Need to Talk About Alice

GOOD BOOKS: “We Need To Talk About Alice” from Plenty on Vimeo. (See all the process, character design, style frames, at plenty.tv/work/good-books-we-need-to-talk-about-alice ) “We need to talk about Alice” was commissioned by New Zealand based agency String Theory and created to be part of Good Books’ “Great Writers Series,” a collection of short films made […]

Friday Poll: The Wurst Challenge

The Wurst Challenge: Charity or Gluttony? In Ypsilanti, Michigan, a children’s art center was the beneficiary of the Wurst Challenge, in which contestants tried to eat twenty-foot-long sausages to raise money for the FLY Children’s Art Center. Participants raised more than they had hoped, for a total of about $6,000 dollars. What do you think: […]